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New to the group and I hope you can help. My husband has a Dell Laptop Inspiron 5100 and it went kaput. I know my way around a computer and I'm at a loss. It keeps restarting. You get the Dell logo logging in and then the Windoows XP loading with the blue bar at the bottom and then it just keeps doing those 2 steps over and over again. I put the bootable cd that I have to restore windows but it doesn't detect it. I went into the bios and made sure that the cd was set to load first and still...nothing. I'm hoping someone can help me?

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Could you please turn off the computer, and unplug the AC Adapter and Remove the battery.
Leave the Laptop this way for about a minute, then plug in the AC Adapter only, leave the
battery out. We want to see if the battery is causing some issue. If this works, all the better.
If it fails, you may have some dying hardware in which case you would contact Dell for further
options.

It didn't appear to be, I came to work for a few hours and am on my way back home so I'll check again when I get there. I know that when I hit the power button all the lights come on in the front but then go off?

If it was a desktop, I would remove the battery or short the BIOS jumper on the motherboard. Or I would remove the hard drive and connect it to a known, good, protected system and run chkdsk /r from the XP CD or from My Computer.

I have a laptop but I don't play with it much, too hard to troubleshoot minor issues.

Well, I suggest...getting a USB 2.0 enclosure for 2.5 inch-drives, put the hard drive in it (so that you can connect it to another working, protected system) and run chkdsk /r on that drive from My Computer. I would then check Event Viewer, looking for errors specific to the newly attached drive.

Ok, on one hand this seems like something I can handle but on the other, I'm a bit confused. Can you send me a name of the item that I need to have or a link so that I can see what it looks like and I can see about how much it will cost?

Last hope? No, I didn't say that. I believe I said it was easy (and probably intelligent), since you have other computers which can be used to connect USB drives.

If my laptop had issues, that's what I would do (I have 2 desktops and 1 laptop).

As for buying online...I've been doing since I decided I wanted a computer in 1996. It's cheaper, greater selection...and I don't have to put up with local jacked-up prices from idiotic salesmen (none of these people seem to really have a clue about computers, they just sell parts, etc.).